Big-Hearted Man
Too big to make his date:
MEXICO CITY (AP) — When Manuel Uribe went out on a date, he made all the necessary arrangements: a forklift to carry him out of the house and a flatbed tow truck big enough to haul the formerly half-ton man and his bed to a party.
But even the open road wasn’t big enough to handle Uribe’s dream of celebrating a budding romance and his success in losing about 440 pounds.
It all goes badly wrong when his sunshield hits an overpass, and his blood pressure plummets. There was nothing his entourage of more than 100 international photogs and reporters could do for him.
“We were going to celebrate that I’ve been losing weight for two years and that it was my girlfriend’s birthday,” Uribe said in a telephone interview. “The saddest part was that I couldn’t fulfill my dream of taking my girlfriend out to eat.”
Good luck, Manuel. He wants to try again this summer, for his 43rd.
It’s actually a moving tale. You’ll notice that the Associated Press, whose scribblers have a talent for bleeding the life out of the most entertaining and fascinating subjects, not only failed to ruin this touching tale with the usual stilted J101 five Ws and an H or any clumsy effort at humorism, but deftly employed a matter-of-fact approach that captures the comedy and pathos, as well as Uribe’s indomitable romantic spirit, all without over-reaching. Very nicely done. They should send Olga R. Rodriguez or whoever edited this around the bureaus to teach the rest of them.
As someone who spends a fair amount of time at work trying to pump life back into stories the AP has tortured and maimed, I appreciated this one. OK, hopefully that’s enough fair-use criticism so I don’t get one of those nasty letters in the mail.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:38 am on Tuesday, March 11, 2008
3 Responses to “Big-Hearted Man”
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March 11th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Good luck to Mr. Uribe. I hope he makes it.
March 11th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Aw, come on, Jules. Without the crappy writing to mock, [i]The Onion[/i] wouldn’t seem half as funny.
March 11th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Guess BBCode doesn’t work on this board. Heh.